This is Marvel Tales for May 1940, with a cover by H.W. Scott. The ISFDB entry for this issue is here. I found this version of the cover at Pulp Covers, where the curators have made the entire issue available for download, and have also posted some interesting interior art, all of it uncredited, unfortunately. There is this, illustrating Nils O. Sonderlund’s “Mistress of Machine-Age Madness.”
This illustrating Robert Wentworth’s “World without Sex.” (As the illustration suggests, the story is something of a doozy and in publishing I’ve had to weigh its undoubted historical significance against whatever bullshit MRA types will generate out of it.)
This illustrating George E. Clark’s cover story “Test Tube Monster.” I like the conceit that by the year 1978 we’d be making beautiful women in test tubes.
And finally this illustrating Frederick Arnold Kummer, Jr.’s “Princess of Power.”
The young lady being lowered into the tube on the cover looks rather stoic about the whole thing. ^_^
Is she coming in or going out? And where did the bra come from?
Based on what I can infer about the story, it’s my belief that she’s being lifted out of the tube (having been created in it).
Still doesn’t explain where the underwear came from.
I agree that she is being lifted out of the test tube (from the grimace of exertion on the chain puller.) She was left in too long and the solution started to generate satin undergarments. Like the skin on top of boiled milk.
The interior pages are ripe with over-wrought prose. “Machine Age Madness” does not waste any time, opening with uncanny greenish lights from the conflagration flickering over the firm roundness of Ann’s young breasts.
The blurb at Princess of Power was off-putting, kind of a data dump of super-villains. But breasts and talons make a splendid illustration.
Well done! Dr Faustus!
Thanks!
And, 40 years on, Zora, Princess of Power, became She-Ra.
By the Power of Greyskull! I need some clothes!
Women from test tubes, in 1978? Well, it was a Petri dish… http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/worlds-first-test-tube-baby-born